1 post tagged “francis collins”

I know I have both Christians and scientists who read my blog (as well as people who would not attribute either label to themselves). I hope this post inspires some (friendly) discussion about science and faith (and not necessarily the Christian faith, at least in this post, but the faith of a higher, all-powerful Being). I am very interested in hearing what you all have to say! This is most likely going to be a long post, but I encourage you to read and respond to it, because I think it's an important issue that deserves discussion.  

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

As someone who's gone to a Christian church for years, I've sort of always pushed the questions and theories of science to the wayside to make room for my faith. The church believes one thing; science believes another, and they definitely don't agree and they can't seem to get along, so I'm just going to ignore it. But darn it, I'm the inquisitive type. So I've undertaken a journey to learn more about science and faith, and to see if the two are reconcilable. Surely if God is the God of the universe, He can hardly be threatened by my lowly efforts to find out the workings of His natural world, right? Galileo, who found himself lodged squarely between science and the church when he posited that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa, said, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." And so it is with this mentality I begin.

Please note that I am NOT a scientist. I was an English major, and now I'm an editor by trade and I remember only odds and ends from biology and chemistry and other science classes in college and high school. My personal knowledge is extremely limited in this area and that's why I'm undertaking this search. I am also not a theologian, although I would say I know more about theology than I do about science.

My search has stared with the Language of God, by Francis Collins. Collins is a nationally recognized scientist, one who was instrumental in the mapping of the human genome, which is apparently really important to medical advances, as well as other areas of science (I think Steve Betz has mentioned it on occasion). He is also a Christian. The Language of God was his attempt to explain to the general public how he has reconciled what he believes about science -- including the ever-so-debatable theory of evolution -- with what he believes in his heart to be true about God. I'm not sure if I agree with everything said in this book, and I'm still trying to discover how his theories might mesh with my own, but I think he has a lot of good things to think about.

Although this statement didn't appear until well into the book, I thought it was a good observation to start out with: "Science alone is not enough to answer all the important questions... The meaning of human existence, the reality of God, the posibility of an afterlife, and many other spiritual questions lay outside of the reach of the scientific method. While an athiest may claim that those questions are therefore unanswerable and irrelevant, that does not resonate with most individual's human experience." This is why searching is worth it at all, I think. Later he says, "Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview provides another way of finding truth."

This book probably could have been a thousand pages long, but Collins decides to focus on what he calls BioLogos (from the Greek word for life bios and the Greek word for word -- or Word, in a higher sense -- logos), which has the more widespread (but still relatively unknown) title of "theistic evolution." He sees the scientific evidence for evolution (especially in reference to DNA) as compelling, yet he also sees evidence for God -- namely in what CS Lewis dubbed Moral Law. Collins believes that because we, as humans, have this innate sense of right and wrong that doesn't seem to fit with evolution. Atheists would say that there is evidence for how this sense would have evolved, Christians say that God wrote it on our hearts. Moral Law is one of my own personal evidences for the existence of God as well.

BioLogos looks like this (to Collins -- there are other variations):

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got underway, no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are a part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

Wow. That's not something that you'll hear at most churches on a Sunday morning. The American Association of Lutheran Church, the group to which my church belongs, professes a literal six-day Creationist view. Collins deems this as incompatible with modern science, but is held onto by "sincere, well-meaning, God-fearing Christians who are driven by deep concerns that naturalism is threatening to drive God out of the human experience." This makes sense -- most believe that if there's evolution, there's no need for God. Instead, Collins posits that the creation account in Genesis is not a literal translation, but does have a more lyrical and allegorical flavor, like the Song of Solomon or the Psalms. Collins believes that "the intention of the Bible was (and is) to reveal the true nature of God to humankind. Would it have served God's puposes thirty-four hundred years ago to lecture to His people about radioactive decay, geological strata, and DNA?" Of course, there is always a concern with liberal translations of the Bible -- people can read into anything. But Collins feels there is a difference between these more allegorical books and books with eyewitness testimony and historical accounts, such as the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. Collins finds that BioLogos to be both scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying.

I think my biggest concern with all of this is how many times in history things have been attributed to God when, in fact, they have had a very logical scientific reasons --  solar eclipses, the movement of the planets, etc. If evolution is true (I'm not saying that it is, but go with me on this), then sticking by our standard Creation story is actually doing a disservice to faith. For when a person who has grown up in the church goes out into the world and finds a lot of contradictory information, there's a good chance that the person will walk away from the faith completely. It's like the God of the Gaps theory. God fills in where science has no explanation. Problem is, if science does find a solution, God is squeezed out. Instead, perhaps we should, as people of faith, be looking to God as the Author and Perfector of all things, even if all things were done a little bit differently than we have been taught to believe.

I know this is a basic basic basic overview of what this books is about, and it doesn't really cover the few reasons Collins gives about why he chose Christianity over other faiths, but this post was getting long enough that I thought most people might start skipping over this post if I kept going. I'm interested in knowing what you all think. I'm still not sure what I think about it all!